Category: Alter Ego

After finishing this project I can confidently say that I have created a fly-through of 4 rooms that I’ve based of my character Ray Sunshine, and that I have stuck to the brief accordingly by producing a 1 minute animation at 24FPS in the correct format, as well as upload sketches that lead up to the final product and a storyboard that clearly outlines my plan for the animation.

I believe that my strengths within this project were definitely the modelling and animating of the animation. I managed to quickly get to grips with the software, mostly because of my 3D background at college, as well as get to grips with animating the camera and utilising the keyframes to my advantage if I made a mistake. Although I wish that I used the smooth tool a lot more in environment, to make it look a lot neater and smooth, than just boxy and flat. And also I wish I could of added a lot more objects to environment especially in the second room, like a ventilation shaft or a poster or two, but because of time constraints had to cut back on some objects that I originally planned on adding in the 4 rooms.

As for my weaknesses within this project, I think that the lighting of the environment as well as the Time Management were the weakest. With the lighting I had mostly been using Maya’s Software Render to see what my scene looked like with the lights, eventually I switched to Mental Ray because it gave the render a lot more detail than Maya did, and when I did it made my lights look a lot darker than I originally set them as well as making the spotlight I put in the shrine look foggy and dirty than I had intended, so that meant I had to brighten and change most of the lights within my scene before I could render, although as you can see in the final animation I didn’t do to good of a job. As for my Time management for the animation I had a knack for putting off production on the modelling because I wanted to make sure that I had everything thought out before I went diving into creating, which eventually resulted in me running out of time and had to cut short on what to model and what not to model.

If I was to re-do this project or continue with the project in my spare time, I would definitely make sure to experiment and constantly check with the lighting to remain on it being too dark for the render as well as seeing what Maya can do with its many lighting settings. I would also make sure I don’t spend too much time with the planning stages of the environment as it will cut down the time I have left to even make it in Maya.

So out sheer determination I managed to get all the lighting, Animating and remaining texturing finished today, despite how ill I feel I’m very impressed with myself.

The animating side of Maya did prove it’s difficulties, mainly because I was an idiot the majority of the time and moved the camera accidentally because I thought that I was in a perspective view. I found it most easy when I only used the camera to look and move around because it’s simply click and drag. The keyframe system was pretty straightforward to use, despite how sometimes I would keyframe the wrong object and mess up the timeline, but they were easily fixable.

All that’s left to do now is render, but at the moment I’m having to adjust all the lighting and shadow effects that I have because, the whole time I was using the Maya Software Render, instead of the Mental Ray which looked at lot cooler than Maya did. The Light that was most effected by this was the shrine light, because it looked very foggy and very dirty, something that I definitely need to fix before rendering.

The more I progress with this project, the more I begin to doubt myself whether or not I’m going to reach the deadline or even be pleased with my work. I’m pleased with some of the work I’ve produced in this environment like the barrels and the till on the counter, but what’s upsetting to me the colourization of the environment, mostly the top floor than the bottom, and the bottom floor only has flat colours in it. I guess the reason for this is because I wanted to make this project as a simple as possible but I still kept clinging onto the idea of using actual textures. I may change my mind about the textures and use simple colours, but I’ll wait till I’ve finished the lighting.

Which is another thing that worries me because I’ve just got onto to the lighting, sure I may be nearly done with it, but they’re just simple bright lights that I haven’t adjusted yet, which to me makes the render look ugly and yellow. I hope that I can get the lighting done quickly tomorrow so I can start animating the same day, because I’m running out of time, and it’s driving me insane.

So far so good I’ve started to add some of the features that will be in my environment, but I still have a ways to go like some of the objects on the shelf as well as making the walls for the shrine room.

I’ve also device a little step-by-step walkthrough of how the animation will be played out. My idea is to have a character that works for my Origins idea (Ray Sunshine) that will walk through the shop attending their duties, to then tumble onto Ray’s bedroom and milk shrine. I will most likely have to record some audio for the characters reaction to some of the things that they’ll see, but first I need to finish the modelling before anything else, once that’s done I’ll a booth and do some Voice Acting, as well as start texturing and animating. CAN’T WAIT!!!

So far, so good. I’ve managed to add most of the objects that I planned to add to the top floor plan as well as starting on creating the walls for the lower floor. I’m love what has been made so far and I think I’m making good progress, but as I step back and look at, I think that the room itself is too small or that some of the objects in the environment are too big. To fix this I’ll either increase or shrink the size of the room/objects, but overall good so far, and I hope by Friday I’ll have most of the environment complete, or nearly finished.

So today I started on making the environment in Maya, and although I’ve had experience in 3D with Lightwave/Layout and some practice with Maya in class, it still was a challenge.

Mostly because all the tools and keyboard short-cuts that I was use to in Lightwave were useless, because every 3D package have the annoying feature of having all the tools in different locations. So every time that I want to connect points/vertex’s together I would normally change to the point tool, select the points and then press a key on the keyboard to connect them, but now (despite how easier it is) I have to find a tool called Target Wield and point and drag a line from one vertex to another and it will merge, which is great, but I had to look up where to find the tool before I used it, and it was the same for most of tools like extrude, knife, and selecting face/vertex/edge.

Anyway so far I’ve made the walls of the store, a small step but I plan, to get a lot more done next week.

Here’s the floor plan of my environment that I will be creating in Maya.

the shop is going to be partially run down because the shop isn’t doing well with business (I mean no surprise really, it’s a second hand oil filter shop that is being ran in a world that uses solar power energy), and so because of this I’m going to have most of the shop be made of wood with a few areas that will have metal patches placed on them.

With the idea of the store, I was mostly influenced with the’Mystery Shack’ from ‘Gravity Falls’ in terms of what the store will look like, as for the rest of the house I’m going to have the restroom look like an out house with a wooden door and with the bedroom and shrine, I’m going to have a gravity lift that will be used to connect the bedroom to the store and have both rooms have futuristic features to them like a sliding door or a floating bed.

So today I pitched the idea of what my lair will look like. The feedback I got from Andy was mostly positive, saying that the idea is good and that my ideas were solid. Although he mention that the layout of my environment has some faults, mostly because he mentioned the fact that the camera would have to visit the room 3 times before it comes to the end. To fix this I may have revisit the drawing board and re-design the layout.